Word: geneticist
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...search coordinated by Wexler's foundation, geneticist James Gusella of Massachusetts General Hospital discovered a particular piece of DNA, called a genetic marker, that seemed to be present in people suffering from Huntington's disease. His evidence suggested that the marker must be near the Huntington's disease gene on the same chromosome, but he needed a larger sample to confirm his findings. This was provided by Wexler, who had previously traveled to Venezuela to chart the family tree of a clan of some 5,000 people, all of them descendants of a woman who died of Huntington's $ disease...
Victor McKusick, a geneticist at Johns Hopkins University, was in the game much earlier. He has been cataloging genes since 1959, compiling findings in his regularly updated publication, Mendelian Inheritance in Man. In August 1987 he introduced an electronic version that scientists around the world can tap into by computer. At the end of December it contained information on all the 4,550 genes identified to date. Says McKusick: "That's an impressive figure, but we still have a long way to go." Several other libraries of genetic information are already functioning, among them GenBank at the Los Alamos National...
WITHOUT a word of public debate, Dr. Philip Leder '56, a Harvard geneticist, was granted a patent earlier this month for his engineered mouse. This marked the first time an animal was classified as an invention. Designed to be susceptible to cancer, the mouse will allow researchers to better understand the causes of that disease in humans...
Ever since the time of Aristotle, scientists have been puzzled by exactly what determines whether a baby is a boy or a girl. Last week the ancient mystery appeared to have been unlocked. A nine-member team led by a geneticist at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research in Cambridge, Mass., announced that an infant's sex seems to be fixed by a single gene called testis determining factor, or TDF. The discovery, declared Whitehead's director, Nobel Laureate David Baltimore, was the result of a "landmark set of experiments...
...launch a process that leads to male sexual development; without it, the fetus will be female. The scientists, whose findings appear in the Dec. 24 issue of the journal Cell, caution that the evidence is still circumstantial, and the discovery will have no immediate application. Even so, says UCLA Geneticist Larry Shapiro, "they have begun to unravel one of the most complex mysteries of biology. We have a long way to go, but this is certainly a major step along...